Month: March 2010

I wanted to be able to show all of the employees birthday’s for the current day. Turns out, this was not a very hard task to accomplish. I have a field in one of my lists’ that contains a birth date field. All of the months and days are accurate, but the years are all set to 1996 for security reasons. In order to show upcoming birthdays, I needed to change a few things.

Here’s the deal with that. The “Birthdate” field holds the actual birthday of the user. In my case, 24-Jul-96. However, I want to see it as July 24 2010.

Well, since the [Today] field in calculated column will not work (all tricks will not work – the field won’t update!), here is a solution that only asks for a yearly update to the column.

First, I created a calculated column that results in the current year “Birthdate”. This changed the view of the date from 24-Jul-96 to July 24 2010. Note: “Birthdate” is the name of the column in my list that contains the actual birthday. Yours may vary.

Create a calculated column to hold this year’s birth date named “Birthday”.

Set the output type of the calculated value to “Date and Time”.

Set the date and time format to “Date Only”.

Use this formula to generate its value.

=DATE(2010,MONTH(Birthdate),DAY(Birthdate))

5. Create a new view of the list named “Birthday” and click on the plus to expand “Filter”.

6. Next, enter in the following. Once you click Ok, you will see all birthdays for the upcoming week.

7. If you only want to see the birthdays for the current day only, simply change the filter to the following.

Just remember – next year you will have to update the formula of the calculated column from 2010 to 2011.

Like this:

If you have a list, like a corporate phone directory, you may start thinking “Man, I wish I could sort through these by the first letter of their name”. If you weren’t thinking that, it’s ok. I was so that why I decided to post this. Follow these steps and your new web part will be up and running in no time.

Open the list that you want to add the A-Z filter to (my case “Employee_Phonebook”)

Under Additional Column Settings, select “Title” from Insert Column and type =LEFT([Title],1) into Formula. Keep all default settings and click “OK”. Note: “Title” is the name of the column you are targeting for this list (i.e. Last Name)

You will see new column called “A-Z” and has the letter “A” value in them already.

From the Site Actions tab, click Edit Page

Click Add a Web Part and add the “Content Editor Web Part”

Modify that Content Editor Web Part and click the “Source Editor” button to add the following code.** Note: You will need to modify the URL’s below to reference your site.

Like this:

If you are using the people picker column in a list, watch out. You could be faced with an odd little issue.

Recently, I created a list to control the views in an InfoPath form. This list uses a people picker column that pulls the “UserName”. What I noticed was that three of the users were displaying differently. Instead of all lowercase letters, the first two letters of the username were capitalized. As it happens, one of those users was unable to see a certain view that they had access to.

I had our AD guy change the names of the users to all lowercase letters. I then ran a full AD import into SharePoint. I waited a little while, pressed CTRL+F5 on my keyboard and noticed that the name changed in the permission checking list.

I logged in as the user and was now able to see the correct view. Weird huh?